For my pre-writing assignments I chose to do the Reading and Writing Timeline and the cluster. I thought the timeline was a useful tool to make me think about my past experiences reading and writing. I helped me to think about who I was as a reader and writer and who I am now. It also made me think back to some of the worst books I have read and what made them so bad as well as some of the major writing projects I have done and why I was successful with them.

The cluster was another good tool to make me think about where I am best suited to read and write: the silent section in our library here at UNE. It is quiet and easy to focus which is why I like it. The cluster helped me to see why I like it and some of the memories I have had there.

Both of these pre-writing assignments where useful in helping me think about my reading and writing. When I am assigned a paper like the one we will be doing I do something similar to this. Instead of clustering or using a timeline I just brain storm and list down my ideas and thoughts regarding the topic. I use those to focus my paper and get a sense of direction about how I want to tackle to topic. In the future I will probably continue to use my brainstorming strategy because I know it works well for me.

 

 

I thought my pre-writing process was very thorough. I started with large structural edits to help the essay flow the way I wanted it to and then I narrowed it down to grammar and smaller edits; global first then local. Although we did the pre-writing assignments like the timeline and web, I did not use them. I find what works for me is to right notes down before hand as I think of what I would like to say or topics I would like to use and use those to focus my essay. I met with Professor Gennaco to go over my structure and then had several of my friends read my essay to get further feedback. These are things I always do because the more feedback I get the more I can dial in my writing.

My final draft was very different than my first draft. I took out entire sections like the Alexie reference and added in new ones like how I use the growth mindset today. A lot of my sentence and paragraph structures changed to make the paper flow better and my wording as well. Overall, I am very pleased with the changes I made and I think my final draft turned out a lot stronger than my first draft.